Prime Intirety (#206)

Jonathan Frech, 3 November 2018

Since ancient times humanity knew that there are infinitely many primes — though countable, writing a complete list of every prime is impossible if one intends to finish.
However, in practice one often only considers a minute subset of the naturals to work with and think about. When writing low-level languages like C, one is nearly forced to forget about almost every natural number — the data type u_int_32, for example, is only capable of representing $\{\mathbb{N}_0\ni n<2^{32}\}$ $\{\mathbb{N}_0\ni n<2^{32}\}$ .
Therefore, it is possible to produce a complete list of every prime representable in thirty-two bits using standard bit pattern interpretation — the entirety of the first 𝟤𝟢𝟥 𝟤𝟪𝟢 𝟤𝟤𝟣 primes.

Generating said list took about two minutes on a 4GHz Intel Core i7 using an elementary sieve approach written in C compiled with gcc -O2.
All primes are stored in little-endian format and packed densely together, requiring four bytes each.

Using the resulting file, one can quickly index the primes, for example $p_{10^7}=179\,424\,691 = \text{ab1cdb3}_{16}$ $p_{10^7}=179\,424\,691 = \text{ab1cdb3}_{16}$ (using zero-based indexing). Since each prime is stored using four bytes, the prime’s index is scaled by a factor of four, resulting in its byte index.

dd status=none ibs=1 count=4 if=primes.bin skip=40000000 | xxd 
00000000: b3cd b10a                                ....

Source code: prime-intirety.c
Prime list (gzipped and split): ((a directory))